Just as we made it to the steps with our suitcases, the teenager jumped up into the air and over the latticework on the opposite end of the porch. Unfortunately, her thonged foot became hooked on the lattice railing and she went splat on her stomach onto the porch floor.
The seventy-year-old man came around the boardinghouse now, huffing and puffing. He stopped at the steps, bent over at the knees catching his breath, right in front of us. His glasses came tumbling out of his shirt pocket and fell onto the steps.
“Oh, let me get that,” I said and stepped up to help him.
The teenage girl had now come to her feet. She stood up, tears running down her face. “You can’t have it,” she said to the older man.
“I’m your grandpa, and you’ll do as I say. Now give me that ring!” he demanded.
“No!” she shouted, stomped her foot and reached for her nose. “If I’m your granddaughter without my nose ring, then I’m your granddaughter with my nose ring. I won’t take it out! You can’t have it.”
“The devil’s work,” the man said. “What will your great-grandma say when she sees it?”
By this point, Gert and I were standing on the steps. I’d given the man his glasses case, which he took as if I was invisible, and I couldn’t help but stare at the poor teenage girl. By the amount of tears she had shed, it was obvious that her heart was broken. She wore those wonders of all retro wonders, faded bell-bottom jeans, a tie-dyed shirt, a hemp bracelet and choker, and a big silver nose ring. Her hair was nearly to her butt, bright strawberry-red, with little braids pulled back from her temples.
“Granny has already seen’it,” she hissed at her grandfather. “What do you care? She’ll be dead soon anyway. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Excuse me,” I interrupted. Both the man and his granddaughter actually looked at me for the first time. “This is the Panther Run Boardinghouse, correct?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Who might you be?”
“Oh, I’m Torie O’Shea, and this is my grandmother Gertrude Crookshank—” I didn’t get to finish my sentence. The man let out a whoop and a holler, and went over to my grandmother and squeezed the daylights out of her with a big bear hug.
“Lordy, Gertie Crookshank!” he said. He then turned to me. “Of course, she was Gertie Seaborne when I ran with her.”
My grandmother steadied herself with her cane and studied the man closely. “Well, Lafayette Hart, you old geezer.”
“You look as pretty as the day Sam Crookshank ran off into the mountains with you,” he said.
“Ran off into the mountains?” I asked. Sam Crookshank was my grandfather, Gert’s ex-husband. “Gert, what is he talking about?”
“That Sam,” the man went on. “Now he knew what he wanted in a woman. And none of them simpering misses stoked his far, if you know what I mean.”
“Far?” I asked.
“Fire,” my grandmother said.
“Oh, fire. Of course.”
“Gertie Seaborne sure stoked it aplenty,” Lafayette said and winked at my grandmother.
“That’s nice,” I said. It was no surprise to me that the teenage girl had taken this opportune moment to run into the boarding-house and away from her grandfather. I was wanting to do the same thing.
“Can we go inside?” I asked. “I have a headache.”
“Why of course,” he said. “Let me get them bags for you. You shouldn’t be carrying them heavy bags in your condition.”
I really had a headache. The dead horse had moved to my head.
An hour later Gert and I were seated at an elongated table in the dining room with six other people, including Clarissa Hart, the one-hundred-and-one-year-old woman who had invited me to this place.
The food was served in clear cut-glass serving dishes, which sat in the middle of the table on top of ivory-colored doilies. Either that or the doilies were dirty, I wasn’t sure which. On my right was my grandmother, and on my left was the teenage fugitive from earlier. The problematic nose ring was still defiantly in place. I’d since learned that her name was Danette Faragher and that she was the daughter of Lafayette’s daughter Faith, who was not yet in attendance. It seemed as though Danette had arrived with her grandfather.
To the left of Danette was Lafayette himself. On that end of the table was Maribelle Lewis, Lafayette’s sister and Clarissa’s only daughter. To her left was Maribelle’s husband, Prescott Lewis, and to his left was an unknown boarder. At least, unknown to me. Finally, to the boarder’s left and my grandmother’s right was Clarissa Hart, seated in her wheelchair at the head of the table.
I’m used to Sylvia, my boss at the historical society, looking so young and spry. Of course, she isn’t one hundred and one, but she’s only shy of it by about six or seven years. Clarissa Hart looked all of her one hundred and one years. She was hunched over in her wheelchair, with an oxygen tube loosely placed at the bottom of her nose, the hose wrapping around her to the tank hanging off the back of her wheelchair. Her hair was snow-white, her eyes blue under droopy eyelids, and her skin was pink and splotched. Her mouth puckered from years of wearing false teeth, but what amazed me the most was the sheer amount of wrinkles that the woman had. It seemed if you could straighten out the wrinkles on her face, she’d have had enough skin for two people.
But that was on the outside. On the inside she was as sharp as a tack.
“I’m so glad that you could make it, Torie, and bring Gertie back to see us,” Clarissa said and aimlessly laid a hand on my grandmother’s arm.
“It’s my pleasure,” I said.
“I’ll just bet,” Prescott Lewis said to me from across the table. He never looked up at me when he said it, so I let it go. He was a large man, late sixties, with a full head of grey-black hair.
“After dinner, come to my room. I have a lot to discuss with you,” Clarissa said.
“Of course,” I said.
“When is your baby due?” Maribelle asked me.
“The middle of August,” I said.
Maribelle smiled, revealing a gold tooth amid a mouth full of stained teeth. She was in her mid-sixties, short, plump, and she had dyed hair that I’m sure was supposed to be some sort of reddish-brown but looked nearly burgundy. Like it was a bottle of wine that had stained her head.
“I remember when I was carrying,” she said. “Was the best years of my life.”
“Really?” I asked, thinking that the woman was nuts.
“Women are their prettiest when carrying,” she said.
I’d have to argue with her when my skin was stretched so far across my stomach that my belly button was turned inside out and purple. But I’ll bet she never looked at her belly button when she was pregnant. My nose was starting to swell, too, which had happened with every pregnancy I’d ever had. Oh, yeah. I was a regular Marilyn Monroe.
“There are things I must tell you,” Clarissa said, bringing the conversation around to her end of the table again.
“Yeah, like where to spend her inheritance,” Prescott piped in.
“Whose?” I asked. Nobody answered me. “Whose inheritance?”
My grandmother just shook her head because she didn’t know what he was talking about, either.
“How long has it been since you been home, Gertie?” Lafayette asked.
“Since 1986,” she answered.
“I had four sons,” Maribelle said, as if we were listening to her.
“Only one is worth two hoops in hell,” Lafayette said.
“Pass the bread,” Danette said to me.
“Tell me, Torie, how long have you been tracing your family tree?” Clarissa asked.
“Oh, since the early eighties,” I said, happy to return the conversation to something I thought was harmless.
“Do you have lots of information on your ancestors?” she asked.
“Some lines of the family are easier than others. I have some lines traced back to medieval times, some farther, if you count the royal lines. Others end in the mid-
1850s with an ancestor of mine in the poorhouse and pregnant, with no clue as to who the father was. Just depends,” I said. “One common thing, though. Except for the French side of the family, my father’s mother, almost every line I have came from or through Virginia at some time or other.”
“Only people worth anything,” Prescott said. The entire meal, he still hadn’t looked up from his plate.
“Pass me the pinto beans,” the boarder said.
“Torie, this is one of my boarders, Norville Gross,” Clarissa said. When she spoke, she stopped and took long deep breaths in between every third word or so. But she never forgot where she was going with her sentence. Wish I could say as much for Gert. If she blinked she got distracted.
“Hello,” I said. Mr. Gross just nodded his head and tore into his pinto beans.
“I chose you,” Clarissa said. “Out of all of Gertie’s grandchildren and children, I chose you.”
“Why? For what?”
“We’ll talk more later. Come to my room as soon as you’re finished,” she said. With that she pushed a button on her electric wheelchair, backed away from the table, and went down the hall. A clanking noise came from down the hallway, and I jumped at the sound of it.
“It’s Granny’s elevator,” Danette said. “She had it installed before I was born.”
“It’s one of those kinds with the wrought-iron gate that closes,” Lafayette said.
“Oh,” I answered.
“Granny likes you,” Danette said. “I can tell. She doesn’t like too many people.”
“Give you the store, she oughta like you,” Prescott said.
Okay, I couldn’t let this go anymore. “What is he talking about?” I asked.
“Pay him no never mind,” Lafayette said.
“Well, obviously he thinks I’m guilty of something, or I’ve done something,” I said. “What do you mean, give me the store? What store?”
“The boardinghouse,” Prescott said and finally looked up at me. His eyes were black and fierce little things, set back into his head, with a big Neanderthal brow above them.
“The boardinghouse,” I said. “You’re joking, right?”
Nobody said anything. Everybody ate their food with new interest, except Prescott, who stared directly at me, and Norville, who seemed oblivious to the conversation.
“Why else would she have asked you here?” Prescott asked.
“I’m sure that’s not what she asked me here for. I’m the family historian. She wants to tell me something,” I said.
“Yeah, well, you’re not our family,” he said.
Three
I did as Clarissa Hart said after dinner and went directly to her room on the second floor of the boardinghouse. In truth, I hated to leave Gert in the company of Prescott Lewis, but she seemed happy to stay and visit with Lafayette and Maribelle, whom she had known as a child.
I hadn’t had much of a chance to look around the boarding-house. We had thrown our suitcases in our room and headed to the dining room for dinner. Now, I didn’t want to keep Clarissa waiting because it was heading for nine o’clock, and I knew that she would go to sleep early.
I couldn’t help but notice all of the photographs hanging on the wall of the stairway, though. Old photographs hung along the wall in an almost pictorial diary of sorts, although I did not know the cast. There were little photographs, big photographs, some in plain metal frames and others in large, fancy wooden ones. The people in the frames watched me all the way up the stairs until I reached the landing, where the photographs ended and the second floor began.
Clarissa’s room was at the very end of the hall on the right. I entered the room and she was already in her bed, which was a hospital bed. She still had the oxygen tube on her face, and she lay on piles of pillows, which made her seem small and weightless.
“I’m so glad you came,” she said and held a hand out that beckoned to me.
I walked over beside her bed and felt just a little awkward, because until today, I’d never met the woman. We’d exchanged letters a few times in the past. I’d written to her asking if she had any information or pictures of my great-grandparents. She had obliged with some copies of old photographs and a few old letters. Now, she acted as if she’d known me all my life.
“Do you know I was already old when you were born?” she asked. Her accent was as strong as her son Lafayette’s.
I did the math in my head, and she had been in her late sixties when I was born. Not exactly ancient, but I understood what she meant.
“I didn’t think I was gonna live much longer then” she said. “Look at me. Who coulda known?”
“You know, I read about a woman in Texas who was something like a hundred and fifteen,” I said and smiled.
“Oh, don’t you say that,” she said. “Fourteen more years like this?”
I just shrugged. “Why was it so important for me to come to West Virginia?”
“You know that I was best friends with your great-grandmother, Bridie McClanahan? Before she met Mr. Seaborne and got married,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Clarissa took a moment to breathe deeply. “You don’t look much like her,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I look like my father. Except he has black hair.”
“Nowadays you can dye your hair any color you want,” she said. “Look at Danette. Caribbean Sunset. That’s the name of the color she put on it.”
“Caribbean Sunset,” I said and flashed back to Danette’s bright strawberry hair. I would have almost thought it was natural.
“Bridie did me a favor,” Clarissa said. “Long, long time ago. And now it’s time to return the favor. A debt repaid.”
“What sort of favor?” I asked. I must admit that even though I asked the question, I was a little worried about what the answer might be. I waited patiently as she reached up and straightened her oxygen tube.
“I picked you because you care,” she said, ignoring my question. “You know about the hills and the people who came here from the highlands. You know about the coal mines and the history. Most people don’t know what went on twenty years before their time, and don’t care. Just plain ol’ don’t care. Not you. You’re one of the smart ones. You’re one of the ones who do care.”
All right. I’d agree with her on that, but I wasn’t exactly sure where this was going. Not all people were history buffs. They just weren’t. No crime there, I suppose. Most of the time, though, when people were history buffs they would go out of their way to learn everything they could about a particular place or time.
“Yes,” I said. “I care very much about where my people came from.”
“I’ve waited eighty-three years to repay this debt. I didn’t do it before now, because I was afraid,” she said.
“Momma?” a voice said from behind me. It startled me a little, and I wondered why I had been so on edge since I’d come here.
I turned around to see a man in his late sixties with slicked-back hair and shiny black shoes. Needless to say, his brown leisure suit was nearly as old as I was. I was probably in first grade when he bought it.
“Momma,” he said, with his arms opened wide.
“Edwin?” Clarissa asked. “Is that you?”
“Who else ya think it’d be?” he asked. He walked over to her bed and kissed her on the forehead. He then produced, out of thin air, I might add, a Hershey’s candy bar. “For you. Shh, don’t tell nobody.”
“I’ll come back in the morning, Clarissa,” I said and let myself out of the room.
On the way to my room, I saw a few other people whom I did not have names for. A crack of thunder shook the boardinghouse and I squealed. Grown woman, here. Just thunder.
As I entered my room, I found my grandmother sitting on the edge of her bed, unpacking her suitcase. Her cane was leaned up against the oak nightstand, which matched all of the other antique furniture in the room. This room even had one of those old dressing tables with the scalloped mir
rors. The only lights in the room were two lamps that were covered with old maroon shades.
“Edwin just arrived,” I said as I stepped into the room.
“Edwin was always a slick fart,” she said. “Never trusted him.”
“So what do you think of all of this?” I asked.
“All of what?”
“Nothing,” I said with a sigh. “Did you really play with the Hart children?”
“I played with Lafayette a little. I was nine or so when he was . . . By the time the younger two, Edwin and Maribelle, came along. . . We played some. I was baby-sitting age.”
“So you baby-sat them?” I asked, trying to make sense of her sentences. It was amazing. Sometimes she could talk for a whole ten minutes with no problems, and then other times her phrases came out unfinished and disjointed.
“Yeah, I was nine when—”
“No, did you baby-sit them, Gert? Edwin and Maribelle?” I asked, trying to keep her on track.
“Yup. I’ve seen all of their plumbing.”
“Gee, that’s great, Gert. Just what I wanted to know.”
I sat down on the edge of one of the beds and took off my shoes. I was tired. I was going to go to bed and sleep as deep and long as I could. While I had that thought in my head, another crack of thunder exploded, reminding me that I might not sleep as well as I’d hoped.
“I thought we’d go see your aunt Millicent,” Gert said. “Tomorrow or the next.”
“Sounds good,” I said. Aunt Milly—or Millicent—was one of my mother’s sisters and the only sibling who had stayed in West Virginia, the others all having moved to Missouri when their mother, Gert, moved back in the fifties.
Without really knowing how it happened, I was in my bed and sound fast asleep within minutes. Not even my grandmother’s snoring kept me awake. But, alas, an overfull bladder will do the trick every time. I awoke around two in the morning and had to use the bathroom Which meant I had to get out of bed and walk down the hall.
I lay there a few more seconds, pondering if it was worth getting out of bed for. Rain crashed against the window in wild surges. I got up and went to the window and looked out. It was pretty cool how the lightning lit up the sky and all of the mountains surrounding this valley were silhouetted against the purple-blue sky. Then the lightning would the down and all would be pitch-black again.
A MistY MourninG Page 2
